The goal of Hardly Hustle is to provide inspiration, drive and motivation in a 10 minute read or less. What you see is what you get. This is hot off the press without an editing team.
It's extremely important to me to not have to report to a boss day in and day out telling them exactly where I am and what I'm doing.
Kayleigh Poss is up.
Who are you and what do you do?
Kayleigh Poss. I am the owner of Inbox Insights - an email marketing consulting company. It is just me at the company, no other employees. I am an email & SMS marketing consultant. I work with companies to boost their online revenue through email marketing - from ideation to implementation and retrospective.
In addition, I am also a property manager for mobile home and RV parks under my company Poss Property Management, LLC. I manage 7 parks (about 500 tenants) in the Raleigh/Durham area. I am a partial owner of 2 of the parks.
What did it take/how did you get started?
I'll mostly focus on the email/sms consulting. I worked at a local Raleigh start up which created popup for e-commerce companies. Some of their clients started asking for assistance in their email marketing sections of their company because now that they had all of these email addresses collected, they weren't sure how to best utilize them.
In a test run of this service offering, I was assigned to work with these clients who wanted assistance as I was the newest employee and my role in the company was not yet well defined. I worked with a few clients during my time at the company and when I was ready to move on to pursue property management, one of my clients asked if they could hire me personally so I could continue working with them. This was the inception of Inbox Insights.
Through working with the client on my own, I truly fell in love with the freedom, hard work, and independence that consulting provided. Through word of mouth, I have onboarded new clients and worked in an array of different e-commerce industries. My consulting services vary from client to client depending on their specific needs.
For some clients, I essentially run their entire email (and SMS) marketing program - ideating campaigns and flows, creating an outline, implementing the assets, and analyzing the data and providing recommendations for future improvement. On the opposite end of the spectrum, some clients only use my consulting services to analyze their campaign and flow data to provide recommendations on making improvements.
What does the future look like for you and your business?
*cue gasps from other entrepreneurs* I'm extremely happy with where I am at as a small business owner. I enjoy the freedom and independence I currently have. I'm open to this changing in the future but at the moment, I'm not interested in building out a team or scaling. I enjoy working closely with 3-5 companies at a time and getting out from behind a desk to do my property management side.
What drives / motivates you on a daily basis?
Freedom. It's extremely important to me to not have to report to a boss day in and day out and tell them exactly where I am and what I'm doing. I have a very strong work ethic so I appreciate that I don't need to be reporting to someone at all times as I can trust myself to do what needs to be done. Financial freedom also drives me.
Luckily, I enjoy working so I am continuously seeking new ways to make money or drive more revenue to my current businesses. My other main motivation is that long term I want to own a dog rescue. In order to do this, I need to work hard now so I can generate enough savings and passive revenue to sustain creating a non-profit.
What advice would you give someone interested in doing what you do?
1. Don't be afraid to take the leap to go out and pursue something on your own.
2. Explore driving income through multiple different sources.
3. It's okay to not be interested in scaling your business into a multi-million dollar company and wanting to keep it small.
What has been the hardest part of your business journey?
The quick ups and downs. It's hard not to have consistent, reliable income (or benefits such as health insurance, 401k, etc.). Some months I have more companies coming to me looking to hire me than I can take on and other months it's nothing but crickets. A few months ago, I lost half of my income within the span of 3 weeks due to massive cuts at 2 of my client's companies. It can be hard and scary but it also makes you buckle down and work harder.
How have you managed burnout thus far?
Anti depressants lol. Just kidding (well, they do help). But taking breaks and knowing that sometimes when you're down bad, the only direction is up. I find it super important to take time away from work, even if its just for a day or two, to go out and see the world and re-center.
Also, I've gotten much better at setting boundaries with clients. I make it a priority during onboarding to make sure that they understand that I will always, always get my work done and in exchange, they need to respect my work/life balance.
What are a few resources that you'd recommend?
I've tried and tried to get into reading or listening to entrepreneur/business media but it has never stuck for me and I realized a couple of years ago that that's okay. I'm not a fake entrepreneur just because I don't listen to entrepreneurship podcasts or read business books. I work a lot - I am essentially on call 24/7.
I am constantly checking calls and emails, even while on vacation. So, I allow myself a break from work through media. So if you want a book recommendation, I recommend anything written by Branden Sanderson (highly suggest starting with the Mistborn trilogy) and for podcasts, I recommend Freakonomics, Check and Balances, Money Talks, and Crime Junkie :)
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